Well it started as a nice morning good weather look at the local Suffolk carboots in the MILDENHAL area then seeing I was near the ajacent adder spot of Cavenham heath thought it would be worth a look. And to my horror the sight that greeted me was this a complete lot of obliterating scouring of the heather within a very prolific adder and lizard habitat with grassies and sloworm. What the f**k are these management cretins up to...? It just beggars belief.wish I had never visited.I suppose they are going to have sheep finish off the destructive management and transplant some plastic stone curlews for the seasons twitchers who will now be able to drive over the heath on their mobility scooters with impunity ,.And no doubt the management will have some unacceptable counter arguement as to why the have taken this course of action. Needless to say I never see a thing as my eyes were just seeing red with anger so I pissed off in strop good job there wasnt any ne rangers about as I would have let rip and probly been arrested? ps the first pic is a pile of heather the pic dont define how bad and wide spread it was. GREAT START TO MY ADDER SEASON KEITH

another own goal by those charged with conserving our biodiversity. I'm just about to complain to NE about destruction of adder, vip and slowworm habitat in the North York Moors National Park to construct a cycle path. This has taken out hundreds of sq metres of adder habitat and will have doubtless killed many reptiles. Hey ho, it must be OK if it's for cyclists, though...

SUZY the whole NE and RSPB setup is one big quango to get euro funded cash for vandalisation of the ecosystem of this country and to place inexperienced academics in jobs that they think their status deserves like managing heaths that have survived for centuries without their 21st century interfering help.

One of the problems Keith is the heathland wouldn't have survived for hundreds of years without management of some kind, the heaths would have gone into succession and now be woodlands.

Somewhere though these managers need to find a balance between the old ways heaths were managed, hand cutting by people etc with a slow change and the obliteration caused by employing contractors with plant machinery. It must go back to their education or lack of it at some point.

Thetford Forest is a superb example of a commercially run timber business that benefits reptiles. Everything is done on rotation. If heathland managers had even the first idea about management they would employ similar techniques and have areas or strips cleared on rotation over several years. This concept seems rather beyond them though and they just obliterate entire areas without a second thought. I expect it will only take someone to claim it was the contractors fault (for doing exactly what they were contracted to do) or someone will cry in a meeting and it will all be forgotten. Again.

Herps don't need a static environment as such, in fact doing nothing even at a brownfield site in Essex would eventually see them decline as the habitat went into succession and scrubbed over and eventually supported mature trees.

If though one has a heath and clears at first parts of the most overgrown areas, herps are unlikely to be affected. As these cleared areas start to recover, they would be colonised quickly. One would then tackle the next area and so on. The herps would be moving always into the new areas as they abandoned the most overgrown and shaded parts of the heath.

So simple, how come nobody in charge of these schemes seems to get it? How come NE don't sanction sustainable management schemes like this as the way forward, instead of giving the green light to overgrazing and site trashing?

all good points Gemma; herps are often colonists of fairly recently cleared / coppiced areas, and winter removal of dense vegetation is unlikely to affect them as these are exactly the places that will have been abandoned earlier by reptiles and amphibians. One of my best London adder sites has seen counts drop from 50 a decade ago to around 10 now, simply due to scrubbing over of the brownfield habitat (rubble, embankments etc) that used to be brilliant for them. I like the idea of a rotational coppice principle for reptiles (good for Duke of Burgundy etc as well!)

Agreed Will, at our local adder site the management involves constant bashing of the more open areas and in the past scraping with plant machinery. Mature trees are left totally untouched and make up more than 80 percent of the site. Ponds are hidden under the trees and are dried out due to the water demands of mature treees.

It beggars belief sometimes watching it all from the outside. The obvious way forward is rotational coppice and partial clearance of the tree infill, yet all they ever do is bash the open heath areas.

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